Arthur W. Schultz Golf Collection
The Arthur W. Schultz Collection includes more than 1,600 books on the history of golf presented to the University of Chicago Library by Arthur W. Schultz. Titles in the collection reflect an avid golfer's interest in the historical, social, and technical aspects of the game. Arthur W. Schultz is an alumnus (A.B., 1967) and Life Trustee of the University of Chicago.One of the earliest and most continuously popular of published golf genres, the instructional book, is represented by a large group of texts spanning the decades from Golfing: A Handbook to the Royal and Ancient Game (1887) and The Gist of Golf (1922) to more recent titles such as Golf Simplified (1946) and Timing Your Golf Swing (1957). The implements of the game and the caddies who have carried them from hole to hole claim their specialized books, as do the skills and achievements of the many women who have played the game, among them May Hezlet, an Open Ladies' Champion of the 1890s and author of Ladies' Golf (1907).
The Schultz collection contains books of advice directed to juvenile golfers and studies of the mental and psychological aspects of the game. Golf humorists such as Grantland Rice, Bob Hope, and P. G. Wodehouse are represented, as are authors of golf fiction from John Cheever to Ian Fleming. The architecture of golf courses is another focus of the literature of golf; from Alister Mackenzie's pioneering text on Golf Architecture (1920) to the work of contemporary designers such as Tom Fazio and Robert Trent Jones, Jr., books in the Schultz collection trace the imaginative reshaping of the natural landscape into the distinctive fairways, roughs, bunkers, and greens of individual golf courses.
Club histories and other publications pay tribute to some of the best known of these courses: Chicago's Onwentsia Club, Olympia Fields, and the Chicago Golf Club, the first complete 18-hole golf course in the United States; famous American courses such as The Country Club of suburban Boston, Shinnecock Hills on Long Island, and Pinehurst in North Carolina; and rapidly proliferating golf links spreading from their original home in the British Isles to Western Europe, South Africa, Australia, Japan, and elsewhere around the world.
The Schultz collection includes books by the acknowledged masters of these courses, great players like Jack Nicklaus and Gene Sarazen, Bobby Jones and Arnold Palmer, and Patty Berg and Nancy Lopez. Books by these and other champions, from "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias's Championship Golf (1948) to Gary Player's 395 Golf Lessons (1972), have defined the performance standards and set the personal goals of millions of golfers who play the game.
The contemporary fascination with golf has also spurred the popularity of large-format books focusing on the greatest courses and most challenging golf holes in the world, works such as Davy Hoffman's America's Greatest Golf Courses (1987) and Andre-Jean Lafaurie's Golf; Great Courses of the World (1991). Lavishly illustrated with double-page color photographs, these books in the Schultz collection present the game of golf at its most beautiful and most ideal, bringing the printed page as close as possible to the actual golf environment.
The Schultz Collection was the basis of an exhibition in the Department of Special Collections in 1998, Reading the Greens: Books on Golf from the Arthur W. Schultz Collection. The published checklist of the exhibition, Reading the Greens: Books on Golf from the Arthur W. Schultz Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 1998) is available for purchase from the Special Collections Research Center.
An illustrated article describing the "Reading the Greens" exhibition appears in the Web edition of the University of Chicago Magazine.
For further information on the Arthur W. Schultz Collection, please contact:
Special Collections Research Center
University of Chicago Library
1100 E. 57th Street
Chicago, Illinois 60637
SpecialCollections@lib.uchicago.edu.